It's the end of the world as you know it – brought to you by a Gnome Mage with big balls of fire

FailFest Friday

The night that we take on VoA, OS and a little bit of Naxx (OK, so I lied about it being a non-Naxx night… but what else can we do?)

I put in a special request with my mates that we take on CoT Culling of Stratholme, for purely selfish reasons. I couldn’t bare the thought that a fellow blogger might have a Bronze Drake while I didn’t. Can’t have a Troll one-upping a Gnome now can we? They agreed, but it was going to be tight, so I made sure I was on early, ready and waiting…

Cookery Failery

Waiting… yeah, what to do while waiting… Cooking Achievements!

I had placed some pre-orders at the AH, so I grabbed nearly everything I would need from the mailbox, and got to it…

I had been gloating to Prelimar about how I had the recipe, so it was 1st cab off the rank...

Then I knocked out a few Northrend recipes, so I could grab the next level of achievement…

That was when I hit my 1st failure… only a minor obstacle, one that was quickly overcome… I didn’t know enough recipes…

Time to do the final level of the achievement… Mmm or not.

Seems I shouldn’t have stopped doing the dailies when I hit exalted with the Kirin’Tor… apparently you need the Dalaran Cooking awards to buy the recipes… silly Gnome.

Ohh well, only a minor fail… I will just finish off the Outland Gourmet Achievement.

Mmmm seems this is a more major fail… Looks like I have to go back and do Outland cooking dailies. I will shelve this for now…

Just to put a dint in what will later be known as Successful Sunday, I did grab my rod and go fishing for these recipes….

Wait, did I say fishing for these recipes…

Yep, 20 minutes down the track it occurs to me that I need to do cooking dailies, not fishing dailies… serious /gnomefail

Anyway, back to /FailFest Friday

A Special Failquest

Enough of my mates are online to hit CoS, so off we go…

Things seem to be ticking along quite nicely… Seem to be… Are we in the Caverns of Time, or the Caverns of “where did the Time go”?

One minute we are ticking along, next minute we only have 7 minutes to go….

Rush… Rush… Rush…

Gnome Down!

Gnome Up!

Boss Engaged…

Gnome Still coming…

10 seconds left….

5 seconds left…

1 second and 2% health left…

Where did he go?

Damn… Pffft…. Grrr…

/FailVoA

Rush off to Wintergrasp, picking up troops along the way…

Someone calls out:

Only got 17 minutes till next battle…

Someone else (a Pugger) says:

No worries will take it down in 17 minutes

At which point I say:

Assuming we are all here and ready in 17 minutes… I figure we have about 10 minutes by the time everyone is here…

Sorry guys… that was my fault… if we hadn’t being failing on my behalf in CoS, we would have cleaned VoA up 1st…

/FailOS+1

We loose one on the way to OS, pick another up as we zone in.

We have done OS with no drakes, and it was a walk in the park, so we decide we will go for OS+1… how much harder can it be?

2 demoralizing wipes later, and 2 Puggers (and a smart arse parting crack from one pugger) down, we accept that we aren’t going to do it tonight.

Actually, I don’t know that we really accept that, but agree that we will do OS+0 just to get the job done for the night.

Seriously you have to hate the fact that 8 players can totally destroy that silly dragon, where 10 couldn’t take out the Dragon and one buddy…. but destroy it we did.

Don’t recall that anything really exciting dropped, though I did pick up a new GnomeBag.

Unfortunately we lost our main Tankadin as he wasn’t feeling that well.

This set the stage for the rest of the night.

Hell, I wasn’t feeling at that well later either…

/NaxxFail

In hindsight, we did OK with the bosses. Sure, 3 attempts on Grand Widow Faerlina and 2 attempts on Grobbulus, but otherwise we one shot the other bosses.

But, that’s only if you look at the boss kills… it was everything in between that was pure fail.

3 hours and 52 minutes to get from Anub’Rekhan to Grobbulus.

Only 8 bosses down.

Deaths… so many deaths…

Faerlina was an orgy of death, just unfortunately, more ours than theirs.

It always sucks when there is one player that isn’t on Vent… especially when that player is a Pugger… especially when it’s their first run with us and doesn’t know how we run, and we forget to type every word into /raid.

2nd attempt, Faerlina’s were going down… focus fired by the pug shadow priest, 1, 2, 3, 4… unfortunately, he was meant to be on Faerlina and the companions were not meant to be going down… wipe.

So after Grobbulus the night was called, we were starting to leak raid members, the mood was glum.

My Personal Arachnid Quarters

Moving along now…

Sunday I finally got around to dragging the network cable under our house… I have been meaning to do this for about 6 months, but always find an excuse not to do it.

My excuses ran out though, so under the house I went.

About 2 minutes later I came scurrying back out.

I suffer a little from Claustrophobia, but not much from Arachnophobia. I live in Australia.. it’s hard to live here and not like spiders (well, at least not coexist with spiders)… A lot of people I have know have had pet spiders… not in tanks or cages, but roaming the house. There’s a lot of flies here too, so it pays to have your own fly catchers.. at least one.

Still, a couple of months of leveling the Arachnid quarter didn’t prepare me for squeezing my body through dirt and cobwebs… lots of cobwebs… so many cobwebs.

I’m glad Blizzard doesn’t overdo the cobwebs in Naxx… they are very unsettling, especially when your are in cramped confines…

Anyway, this is Sunday… so this was a /Successful Sunday venture, and cable is now strung under the house, and I am now above the house, no spider bites and only a little bruised from squeezing through the tiny gaps under the house (They must employ kids to do the under house stuff… seriously, I am not a big guy, but it was tight…).

/Successful Exploring

My wife took her mate home on Sunday night, so I got a bit of play time once I got Odin down in bed.

I joined up LFG for CoT, then scratched my head… wasn’t there something I had to do…

Oh yeah…

I had to venture back to Outland to try out the RNG on those recipes from the cooking quests. I got that one that sends you up to Blades Edge Mountains. I quickly knocked that over, and had no bites on LFG, but noticed 3 unexplored areas of Bladge Edge. So while the carpet was up in the sky, I kept on flying

Apart from dodging a few Horde attacks, it was all clear skies… until this popped up…

Of course that’s a good thing… Sure it’s only a minor achievement, but the good news is that only leaves 4 parts of Netherstorm and I have completely explored Outland… I might have only done 50-60% of the Outland quests, but I will have cleared all the cobwebs off the map.

Unfortunately no recipe dropped from the barrel of fish.

/Successful Sunday, the finale

Not long after this achievement pinged on my screen, I got an invite. At first I thought it was one of those random, no chat invites, but it turns out that they had tried to communicate.. I just didn’t respond (I mean see the pst), but I got the invite anyway… thankfully.

I recognized the name, can’t remember where from, but it must have been from some other pug run.

For a moment I had one of those sinking feelings when one of the party g2g as we were entering the instance. Luckily 30 seconds later we were full again… 3 Pallies, 1 DK and a Gnome Mage.

We rocked through the place, even though the DK was concerned that we didn’t have the DPS, as it seemed to be taking forever (still 15 minutes on my timer… but whatever…).

Nothing to worry about though and before we knew it, we were engaged with the Infinite Corruptor, and before I knew it, I was staring at:

It’s that this point, where I sat back, took a deep breath, took another deep breath. Checked the rolls… yep sure enough someone else was rolling, the question was, who was going to roll the 1?

Turns out that the guy that invited me was being run through by his mates, just as mine had on Friday night, just so he would get the drake, of course I didn’t realize that… not until he rolled a 1, and I didn’t!

I did offer to run anything he wanted, any time I was on in future…

So, another pet that I have to feed… or is that sweep the stables after…

Still, I will get over the colossal poop…

After all, I look better than any ol’ Troll, any ol’ day…

PS: Thanks to Eury, Jong, Rip, Rhii, Larisa, Theerivs, Prelimar and Cathy for all the submissions to my blogday gifts. I just have to put them all together now… wont be long, within the week we you will start to see some results…

Oh big grats to the dragon! I used ot for very long, until I got the red one from doing all the 5-man achievements.

To be honest the bronze one looks better. Seems to be more fit for flying.

I can almost miss the timed runs in CoS I did for getting it, I don’t know what it is with that achievement, but it has some kind of relaxing effect on me. It’s like music. Just follow the flow and enjoy…

congratulations on the dragon! i’m not high-speed mounted in northrend yet, but i’m getting close. but even then, i’m far, far from having such a fantastic ride. i’ll be happy if i get to make my carpet in the next week or so!